WILLING and able

Mary was as good as any lad – and she was going to prove it

- 

Why can't I work in the mill with you?' Mary challenged hotly.

Her uncle Ned shook his head yet again. He had been the tenant of the mill for nearly 30 years, ever since the place had been built in the 1840s. The rustic stone building, with its massive and creaking wooden undershot wheel, part-submerged into the leat - an offshoot of the river - stood in a green vale between sinuous rolls of deciduous woodland.

'I'm a woman grown, with my 16th birthday a whole month behind me,' Mary pointed out in frustration. 'If I was your nephew instead of your niece, you'd let me help right enough.'

As headstrong as his niece, Uncle Ned puffed out the barrel chest beneath his white smock and grumbled, 'And this is all the thanks I get for putting a roof over your head when my brother and his wife upped and died of fever last year - leaving you with no means of support.'

At this, Mary's Aunt Clara gave her husband a pleading look, as if to implore him not to bring Mary's recent tragic loss into his argument.

'You're not near as strong as a nephew would be,' Uncle Ned changed tack. 'You can blame Mother Nature for that, not me.'

'I could use a cart to move the sacks, and the hoist to lift them. I could maintain and grease the machinery...' Mary had done a lot of thinking over the past year on how she could be of use to her uncle.

'I could keep the leat free of weeds so that the water always flows, I could sieve the fine flour, repair the sacks. There are plenty of tasks in the mill that a woman could do.'

'No!' snapped Uncle Ned, then ended the conversation in the same way as always, by stomping out of the kitchen to begin his work at the grindstone.

Mary wanted to scream in rage, but that would only distress Aunt Clara, so she merely rolled her eyes at the woman who had been so good to her, and reluctantly had to agree when Aunt Clara declared, 'Ned's a stubborn soul - but a good man for all that.'